JoelSchlosberg

What do you mean, there are no musical sequels with unironically good songs? The various "Gold Diggers of..." movies have plenty of great, original, literal Bubsy Berkeley numbers. To be sure, it's unclear whether they are technically sequels or remakes, reboots, reimaginings, or just a Madden-style "put out a new one every year or two with the year in the title so it's clear it's not the existing ones" thing. (The Museum of the Moving Image showed Gold Diggers of 1933 at the same time that they had an exhibit spanning the Madden series, showing how such annual refinement could be art.) Even IMDB seems unclear on the issue, listing "of Broadway" and "of 1933" as both remakes of and follow-ups to The Gold Diggers. But as early as 1933, there were outstanding musical numbers in a movie that owed at least as much to a predecessor in premise/storyline as Grease 2 does to Grease.

The 3 video games based on Lawnmower Man is not an extraordinarily high number. Movies often have licensed video games for almost all the various gaming platforms current at the time, which can be a lot. For instance, there were Spider-Man 3 video games on at least 9 different devices: Game Boy Advance, mobile phone (pre-smartphone), Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Wii, Windows PCs, and Xbox 360. Last Action Hero had 7: Amiga, DOS, Game Boy, Game Gear, Genesis, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super Nintendo.

^ Zoolander.

But if the organization that's doing the experiment is so eeeeevil, why don't they just experiment on humans to begin with?

Data did have an efficient way of listening, but it was a bit different: [media=''] [/media]

Why isn't he even worse the first time he plays the VR game? The first arcade game, Computer Space, was famously incomprehensible to a general audience, and it has graphics like this: How is Jobe able to fly around in 3D with no prior experience? (The game's rules are unclear, but it does not appear to be a rails shooter-type game that takes care of movement for the player.)

For all the monkey business, it's never explained why they use chimpanzees in particular. Wouldn't gorillas be more effective on the battlefield, larger and stronger and with a longer thumb making it easier to hold weapons? Are the chimps being trained to actually use weapons in physical reality the way the chimp uses the gun in the opening? If so, why don't they take precautions against just such an occurrence? If not, and they're only controlling the weaponry remotely like a drone pilot (or virtually), why would the training make them good at holding and aiming a physical gun? Having lots of practice playing Street Fighter doesn't automatically translate toward the motor skills used in an actual street fight.

More head-scratching dialogue: Jobe is confused by Dr. Lawrence Angelo's mention of "endocrine", which the good doctor then explains as follows: If Jobe doesn't know the word "endocrine", how would he know the words "secretions", "thyroid", "adrenal", and "pituitary"? How is he acquiring new vocabulary, anyway? Even if he's getting smart, he can't know words he doesn't encounter. Is there a virtual reality educational program, like Reader Rabbit on steroids? Is he speed reading like Johnny Five in Short Circuit? [media=''] [/media]

This is not the most WTF line in the movie but still: "you'll get used to games"? Huh? Note that it doesn't say "video games" but just "games". Not that I'd expect Jobe to be up to playing, say, chess, but has he really never played a game of any kind before?

Omission: the Lawnmower Man short story is in Night Shift, the very first book collecting Stephen King short stories... which also includes "Trucks", the basis for HDTGM favorite Maximum Overdrive! Plus the sources for such quality motion pictures as Children of the Corn and The Mangler. You'd think they would have stopped making movies from Stephen King short stories after that, but then we wouldn't have Stand By Me or The Shawshank Redemption (both from his second book collection of shorter-than-full-length-novel tales)! Also, in Night Shift's introduction, Stephen King answers in detail the question in the Vampire's Kiss episode of how much an agent earns for selling a short story! About the only thing King doesn't lay out is how long it takes the agent to sell a short story, but unless it's more than a couple full days' work, his agent would be earning more an hour from the story than he is! (I had a correction/omission in mind that I never got to writing up: I don't think it was implied that Nicolas Cage was agenting short stories full time. The author specifically refers to the short story he's asking for archived info about from Cage as one he wrote earlier at the beginning of his career. It seemed to me to be implying that he'd moved on to higher-paying markets since, but had some sentimental nostalgia to the short story sale for breaking him in to getting paid for writing.)

Nobody's mentioned the existence of a previous Lawnmower Man film. At 12 minutes, it doesn't have room for VR or any other extraneous additions, just a man who uses a lawn mower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caKZdPlEu2U

In 1991, there was the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Game", in which the end result of centuries of advances in video game graphics is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is12anYx2Qs

From the same year, a news segment on VR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGEdWjLfeXY "The kids that use our system say, 'I'm not going back to flatscreen after this!'" A few years later into the 1990s, there was Nintendo's infamous Virtual Boy:

Correction: a listing of similar stories includes both Flowers and Algernon and Charly, but those are 2 versions of the same story! Charly is the movie adaptation of Flowers for Algernon (which exists in both short story and novel length). That's like saying that "Trucks" and "Maximum Overdrive" are 2 different Stephen King stories about trucks.

Plus, The Simpsons Movie.

They actually did get permission from Atari, Capcom and Namco for the copyrights and trademarks on the arcade cabinets in the hideout.

The songs list in the end credits includes "I've Got No Strings", but the "courtesy of" line included in every other song, is conspicuously absent: The Nostalgia Critic has both parody and commentary grounds for claiming fair use. Neveldine/Taylor... don't.

What's going on with the games being controlled by Minority Report-style hand gestures in the air? Is the position of the hands being measured directly, like a theremin performer's, or is a camera image being interpreted Kinect style? Either way seems prone to indistinctness and misinterpretation. Competitive fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat still rely on mashing buttons for good reason, and the precision they offer would be far more essential if actual lives were at stake.

Why aren't the boundaries of the game actual boundaries? There's a line saying that "It's restricted area. It's beyond the borders of the game. I couldn't put you there if I tried." But shouldn't the borders of the game be actual, well, borders? Like thick prison walls or the water around an island? Even the trailer for Escape from New York had to beef up Manhattan Island's physical isolation with extra security measures to make the premise work -- "The bridges are mined. The rivers are patrolled." Or it could avoid restricting the action to begin with, as in the original book of The Running Man where the contestants are free to roam the country -- subject to the full opposition of law enforcement. Or they could deliberately make the boundaries contrived, like the invisible walls in video games, as a deliberate satire. Or they could have the boundary be enforced by the nanites, like those grocery store shopping carts whose wheels lock up past the parking lot. There are many possibilities that would add to the suspense and satire of the movie, and exactly none are used.

But why wouldn't they also clarify the specific Iranian and Mexican foods available, when there are many possibilities for those as well? Even Taco Bell has more varieties of Mexican food than just tacos.

Nobody's mentioned the puzzling moment of dialogue when Kable asks Simon "What are you, 12?" and Simon replies "I'm 17 actually, thank you." Is Kable just being sarcastic when he thinks that Simon may not be old enough for a bar mitzvah? And is being controlled by an underage teenager really that much better? What IS the minimum age to play the game? How does it correlate to the minimum age of military service? Is the minimum age lower with parental consent? Do teens get fake IDs to sneak into the game?

^ And why wouldn't it be "Iranian, Japanese, or Mexican"?

Did Ultron get the idea to sing "I've Got No Strings" from this movie? Either way, it is crazy that not one but two action movie villains have sung what may be the least intimidating Disney song. In his End of Days episode, the Nostalgia Critic has Arnold Schwarzenegger sing it to make him look ridiculous: What is YOUR pick for a Disney song from a non-villain that would actually work as a badass villain song? My pick is the Ballad of Davey Crockett: I'm not messing with someone who killed a bear as a 3 year old!

I couldn't tell if the audience's intended reaction is supposed to be "haha, that student really stuck it to that snotty teacher!" Or "that student sure has terrible taste".

My favorite Stephen King universe connection that occurs only in the books: the Stand By Me junkyard dog "Chopper was - at least until the Camber's dog Cujo went rabid twenty years later - the most feared and least seen dog in Castle Rock."